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The Guardian (and seemingly most of the country) got the Bristol riots all wrong…

hmm… I just read a Guardian article about the gentrification of Stokescroft in Bristol and they referenced the Stokescroft riots a few years ago, but they got it all wrong. Unfortunately they’re still saying “when a protest against Tesco turned into a riot” which is entirely innaccurate. From what I can tell it was when a squat eviction prompted by A foolish and unrealistic threat to Tesco’s by one of the squats residents led to ten or 20 more police vans than necessary clogging up Stokescroft road and Gloucester Road and several police bullying random people on their way home from bars (who had nothing to do with any of it) and quite clearly riling the merely curious crowd up into a “we hate cops now and we’re drunk” riot-frenzy and the Welsh riot police who were inexplicably on call for the riot nobdoy should have been expecting to happen suddenly appear and start the fight one can only assume that they wanted. Then, once they ran off, the opportunists in the community thought either “I hate Tescos” or “I want free groceries” or both and smashed Tescos and grabbed what they wanted. That, to the best of my knowledge is exactly what happened.

To the best of my knowledge, in other words, merely a point of view, data, story, etc. Yeah, I was at a mates house on Gloucester Road at the time, I had mates in the aforementioned squat, and I tried to calm everybody down with bottles flying over my head at the cops. My account is basically what I remember. I am an eye-witness.

Oh yeah, the rest of the article, gentrification has it’s ups and downs, pluses and minuses etc etc. Blah blah blah. Maybe more on that later, or maybe I’ll shut up and make some more music.

I wrote a more detailed article about the riots at the time, referencing interviews and articles but all this information is out there still. Most police are decent guys who want to help, but the few who want to bully, they can kill people and start riots. For more on that see my previous post entitled ‘Dead Man’s Trigger’…